


Pas De Deux

by softnoirr



Category: Women's Soccer RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, Angst with a Happy Ending, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, praise kinks: for when you can't afford therapy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 15:42:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28566402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softnoirr/pseuds/softnoirr
Summary: Pas De Deux | pɑː də ˈdəːa dance for two.including five sections that, together, tell of a brief love story.If home is where the heart is, Christen’s is tangled amongst loose programs and clumps of gum stuck beneath a fold-out, fake velvet seat in a theatre she’s long since forgotten the name of.She doesn't know when she lost it. Probably about the same time Tobin lost everything.Or: Christen's a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, Tobin never will be again, and therein lies all their problems
Relationships: Tobin Heath/Christen Press
Comments: 40
Kudos: 146





	1. Triumphant Returns, Unwilling Reprieves

**Author's Note:**

> For the anon whose birthday was the 28th of November. I broke a few deadlines to get it to you, but please accept a very belated birthday present. 
> 
> It takes a village and so;  
> Thank you to writersblock109, memoized, and alex.. for reading this first and pulling its strings together.  
> Thank you to casson, who's [Ballet AU](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26136109/chapters/63584632) you should absolutely be reading, for giving me their blessing to go ahead with this. 
> 
> This work is divided into sections, of which there will be five. Chapters one through five comprise section one.

**Section One: The WINTER of our Discontent**

> _“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”_
> 
> ― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

* * *

When everything is said and done, the curtain closed and the roses all thrown; Christen thinks that it began as most things do; at the very end of all that had been.

The stage is covered in a thin layer of dust and grime, a few splatters of sweat here and there, and Christen’s legs nudge against its rough edges as they swing over the edge.

A bead from a Snowflakes hairpiece, lost in the dip of final bows, rolls over the gloss of electrical tape and the marks they form. The last run of The Nutcracker insisting on leaving its mark. Someone could slip on it and lose everything all too easily, were the show not already done and the audience empty but for a few reviewers and janitors milling about. Christen swipes it into the orchestra’s pit just to be safe.

Ballet was a fleeting art. Beautiful. Impermanent. The magic was in each turn, and every spin had to come to an end. Every jewelry box twirl eventually dwindled slower and slower until the music ran out of places to go. 

The chairs of the audience are the rough kind of velvet you can’t escape. Out in the lobby, families of champagne smiles will praise and pity, pat their well-dressed daughters on the head, smoothing down little pieces of hopes and dreams. Christen can picture it, can hear it, the way it would feel. The way it _had_ felt. 

And Christen can’t do it. Not in this city, not on this stage, where everything was lost oh so many times. Not where Tobin- She _can’t_. She wants-

There's a thud of scraping footsteps against the roughly smoothed stage floor. 

Christen inhales.

* * *

Christen returns to New York laden only with a suitcase, a sour-faced cat, and a chip the size of the Metropolitan Opera House on her shoulder a mere week after a Christmas she hadn’t bothered to celebrate. 

It's a transient sort of happiness. Blithe and biting. 

Her apartment, unpacked and overpriced in Greenwich Village, echoes the feeling. Nurse, her storm faced ragdoll cat who’d never been anything but disgruntled one day in his tiny little life, bats at insects where they land against the windows. His tail drags along the edges of the windowsill in long strokes as he follows them with his eyes. Surveying untouchable prey he wouldn’t know what to do with if he caught. 

He’s a monster, and he’s the best thing Christen ever did for herself. A fluffy, French monster who was used to ballerinas doting on him and being fed offcuts from the fish market. New York was probably going to be a bit of a shock to his system. 

Christen thinks, dully, that it was something of a _‘you and me both, kid,’_ situation. 

Nurse sniffs at the air as if to say ‘ _we are not the same_ ,’ and Christen turns back to her mug of coffee, the caffeine a precious life source. Personifying her cat was, perhaps, a sign of the impending insanity of this city. 

When Christen had been desperately alone that first year at the Paris Opera Ballet, missing her language and lacking a language she could share with those around her, so young and already so wracked by regret, Nurse had been her saving grace. Her disgruntled, entitled little saving grace who turned up his nose at any flavour of cat food that was not the exact tin that he desired and who would probably prefer to be left alone most hours of the day. Though, to his credit, he was good at climbing onto Christen’s chest and kneading with sharp, tiny paws; the sting a sharp reminder that she was still alive. 

Looking after Nurse had, at times, been nearly all Christen could be sure she knew how to do. Occasionally, it still is. 

Christen pours out her coffee and rests her leg on the barrier bench that divides her minuscule living room from her somehow smaller kitchen, bending over it and feeling the stretch along her hamstring like a long-awaited welcome home. In the cold of the morning, her knees are stiff and faintly purple, but they jump into eager attention at even the slightest indication of a dance. Her body is tired but well trained. 

She’ll feel better with a layer of makeup and a curtain up between the recesses of her mind and the face she presents; one that isn’t really her own at all. 

The mirror she’d bought from a home goods store under the insistence of her sister rests against the wall, still covered in bubble wrap, its reflective surface staring at only dull white paint. Christen switches from her right to left leg, bearing down on it and taking a sip of coffee with her free hand, listening for the little pop in her hip. The coffee tastes like dirt, and she resigns herself to stop for a better cup on the way.

New York is coming awake outside. For her, at least, as she emerges into it with tentative, cold-tile steps. Christen has to be at the studio in a half-hour for a transitional meeting. Wasn’t it all transition these days? From the shoebox apartment to the insoles of her pointe shoes.

“Just you and me, bud.” Christen smiles at Nurse. He peers back at her like she’s interrupted something of the utmost importance and he’s attempting to assess whether he should give her the time of day. 

Christen grabs her bag off the bare countertop and braves the day like the coward that she is. 

The city is just this side of lonely, the side of the road covered in sludge tourists would insist on looking at with wonderstruck eyes and label “snow.” The gaps filled up with heavy air and tired commuters. The city that never sleeps is weary and longing for a reprieve. Christen can’t help but relate. 

The ball has already been dropped, and the mistletoe is starting to come down, the thin veil of commercial magic going with it, but the tourists would linger for a moment more, trying to suck the last bit of excitement they could get out of it. Christen couldn’t really blame them. Not so long ago it had been her, twelve years old and gripping her Dad's hand as they crossed a honking street, his free hand resting on her head at every street light. A silent check-in while she buzzed with excitement. 

They had been very far from home. It hadn’t felt like it. Christen is closer now to home than she has been these past nine years. It doesn’t feel like it at all. 

It isn’t a homecoming. This was a place of homesickness and bitter disappointment, but all places are. Everywhere Christen goes, she takes the same soul with her, and isn’t that the problem at its core? Not the cross, but the shoulders that carry it.

In many ways, she doesn’t think she ever really left this city. There is the cobblestone she tore the edges of her pointe shoes on while running for a cab in a blur of tears, the ribbons spilling at her ankles from where she hadn’t had the time or patience to take the shoes off. There is the coffee shop she used to frequent, where her order would still taste the same. 

She took it to France with her, but it stayed as and where it was. She hates it and she breathes it and everything that ever went wrong for her screams back in a blur of taxi cabs.

In some ways, she doesn’t feel that she’s really come back. Maybe some actress in her skin has. Christen never left and so Christen can’t return. Whoever ‘Christen’ was. It should worry her, that she doesn’t know. It doesn’t. That’s a part of the problem. There’s too much to worry about; not enough space to follow through. The nostalgia is less of a succubus and more of an old foe she’s come to visit. 

Christen had spent Christmas Eve on a red-eye flight, forgive her if some of the illusion of the strangely nicknamed cities she spends her life in has worn off on her. The Big Apple, the City of Love, City of Angels. It all meant the same in the end, and it all tastes the same in the dark. There were a perfectly normal amount of apples in New York, little love to be found in Paris, and nothing ethereal but the word ‘home’ in Los Angeles. 

If home is where the heart is, Christen’s is tangled amongst loose programs and clumps of gum stuck beneath a fold-out, fake velvet seat in a theatre she’s long since forgotten the name of; Explanation Avenue, perhaps, maybe Exhibition Road. It’s impossible to be sure. 

Trying to find her heart, still beating and still burdened, had brought her back here, checking under every single seat she’s visited in all these years. 

It had been an excellent plan, in theory. A starring role at the American Ballet Theatre. A starring role in the Spring Season, longer still if she were to like it. Well, if she likes it and bygones are to stay bygones. She could take that star on the door she never got the first time around, or she could return to the one that hung for her in Paris. The one that had filled the void through hard work and aching excellence. 

In practice, it found its faults. First of all being, New York was freezing on the tail end of a harsh winter, and Christen did not like the cold any more than she liked the concrete or the people. It was a far cry from the homeland she envisioned when she thought of a return. She usually pictured soft beaches and warm sand. Los Angeles, where the sun still rose on her family and beautiful dreams. A city of angels where dancers who could leap across the sky in sweeping white fit right in. 

The second fault was, of course, the starting over. Christen had done it far too many times for comfort, and it was a practice she was growing weary of. And yet. 

Amandine had dissuaded her from the change before Christen had left France. The Paris Opera Ballet principal dancer had turned up her nose at the very idea that Christen return to America to step into the role of an injured - on her way to ruined - principal. That she would have to live in New York, would have to reestablish herself, would have to live that dream she’d barely looked at in years, were all awful asides. 

_“Christen, this is a… particular choice,”_ She had said. Christen had never truly understood the expression Gallic shrug until they met. 

It was. It still is. Here she is regardless. 

It’s Paris all over. All on her own in a city that didn’t care about her, set to make an entrance and a case for herself. Only, this time, she didn’t feel as if she might burn a hole through the fabric of herself. She didn’t feel much at all. 

Marketing was sometimes just that. Tourism was sometimes easier than living. Coming back had been the easiest mistake she’d ever made. 

She knows the streets well enough to make her way to 890 Broadway in her sleep. It's familiar in the way paintings can sometimes be, a reflection of a feeling and place you know, but fictionalised, rediscovered.

The walls of the Starbucks a block from her apartment have been painted since she was last here. The tables look the same. She doesn’t recognise any of the employees. She supposes she wouldn’t. It would be strange to find them frozen in time. It feels wrong regardless. As if the world should have stopped where it was. 

Christen leans against the street-side window and stares at her phone, scrolling on and on through the same set of emails, re-reading the words as if they’ll reveal something new this time. Some “gotcha” that’ll change the way things were, the way they will be again. 

“Christie,” the barista calls into the shop, empty but for the employees and two young girls decked out in scuffed track pants and ballerina buns in the corner. They can’t be much beyond middle school, that earnest spark in their eyes too bright to make sense of. 

Christen should be forgiven for watching them from the corner of her eye for a beat too long, too longing. 

“ _Christie_.” The barista repeats, his hair a rough blonde and face full of impatience as he stares straight at Christen. The two girls in the corner glance at her with a strange type of reproach.

Christen straightens, taking a half step closer to the counter. “Christen?”

“Sure.” The barista shrugs, shoving the coffee the rest of the way towards her. Christen’s fingers are almost too cold to pick it up, clasp around it tightly when she does. 

The girls whisper to themselves as she stirs in sugar. She hopes they’re just kids performing in their school's recital. One of them coughs pointedly when she moves towards the door, and Christen glances back at her. Her face is set, confident, bold. Behind her, the other girl’s eyes twitch between them in barely restrained horror.

“Are you Christen Press? From the American Ballet?” The first girl asks, all jutted chin and attitude, “Because we dance in the studio company, and we heard you were going to be a principal this season.” 

Christen smiles at her, smally. “Wrong person, sorry.”

She hails a cab instead of risking the walk the rest of the way to ABT.

* * *

Loving ballet is one of the few things Christen can definitively date. Stamp a number and a moment on it and be on her way. Everything has been complicated since, but this was simple. Once, she had believed that it always would be. 

In what had been intended as a simple Christmas themed family outing, her Dad had taken her, along with both her sisters, decked out in scratchy stockings with their sugar-caked skin and tongues stained candy-cane red, to see The Nutcracker. Christen, ever the enthusiast, hadn’t been content to leave it at a simple enjoyment of the arts and had promptly fallen in love. Irrevocably and damningly so. 

She had been fascinated, enraptured from the first note of music. Had watched on with awe as the ballerinas twirled across the stage with ease, muscles flexing in long lines of movement. Bodies thrust up into the sky, leaping across the stage, music swelling as the dance quickened and emotions rose. The orchestra below their feet thumping and bouncing and swelling. Quick pace with quick feet, slow build with languid control. All of it— a perfect rhythm. By the time the Sugar Plum fairy had graced the stage she had known, without a shadow of a doubt, at the age of five, it was her truest purpose in life.

What had followed for her family was countless hours spent shuttling her between dance classes and recitals and the regular school, which seemed meaningless to her. Her father had endured endless attempts at ballerina buns, thousands of bobby pins lost within her tresses, and hundreds of dollars sunk into ballet shoes, and all the while that golden ambition had driven her further and further into the air. 

He’d moved to New York for her, the first time, just the two of them in the big wide world, trying to force the very small one of ballet to let her in. Her mother and sisters had stayed behind. In hindsight, with the blood on the stage and the trail of shame all the way to France, it hardly seems worth it. All ABT had been good for was heartbreak. 

Tearful goodbyes before boarding school and beaming _‘I am so proud of you’_ s’ for every casting and acceptance. It had hardly been her father's intention on an evening in December when he was caught more in creating memory than an obsession, but every act since, every step and line and moment had, for Christen, driven her to this.

Blinding perfection in quick, succinctly, and technically executed leaps. The thud of her feet as they return to the floor. The call for the next group to step up. A bustling mix of corps de ballet and soloists lining up to take the same space she’d just flown across. The principals lounging in the corner, a few of them watching vaguely, a few sipping at protein drinks and talking amongst themselves. Lions under beating sun, surveying the wildebeest. 

She’d become one of the lions, but it had taken more than the blood and sweat promised by every coach who had screamed at her. It had taken absence. That, she had found, was the greatest cost of them all. Even upon return, it savaged at her with a sting that only loneliness, in its ever-growing intimacy, could cut with.

The little girl that had watched the Los Angeles Ballet with awestruck eyes, gripping the edge of her seat and flexing the muscles of her legs along with the jetes of the perfect women on the stage in front of her would certainly never understand this. Would never understand what it came with. 

Then again, she didn’t have to. She wasn’t here. 

Christen can find the moment when she loved it. She can’t figure out where she stopped. It probably had something to do with Tobin. 

All things die. Love never lasts. All that all-consuming, mind-numbing, life-ruining shit. Whatever. She doesn’t think about it all that much anymore. She just dances and wills it to be enough. 

* * *

Kevin is waiting on the curb for her, a cigarette between his lips and anxiety in the bounce of his knee. He’s older than when she last saw him, lines around his eyes and a dreariness in his cheeks. His coat is heavy and buttoned to his neck, but it's still too thin for the cold of a New York winter, the leather of his shoes curling into the snow on the street. 

Christen pushes open the door of her taxi with a small smile for the driver, watching Kevin watch her as she crosses the space between them. Her own coat isn’t enough for the weather. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to this sort of chill. Even after all those years in France. It wasn’t running away. It wasn’t acclimatising. 

She’s known Kevin since she was thirteen when he’d still been dancing and she’d been in Studio Company, trying desperately to prove her worth. He’s insistent and aggressive in both his praise and criticism, dragging them through routine after routine to try and find the perfect artistic niche. 

She has always liked him, despite how he often appeared as if he had just struggled through a long and triumphant quest that had named him the Lord of some other dimension, but all that remained was his windswept attitude and delusions of grandeur. 

“Mon Cher,” Kevin smiles against a gust of wind, cigarette creasing into his mouth and glowing with the breath he sucks in. Kevin was American, born and bred, the French just another peculiar insistence. Along with his favoured ‘my darling.’ Just those two words alone could send a shiver down her spine and have her straightening her position, sure she was about to receive a crushing insult from a ballet master. 

“Hi,” Christen says, small in a big city and the space between them. Kevin’s lip twitches like he knows, and he tugs the cigarette from his mouth, stamping it out into the ground beneath them.

“Come on. Time to talk.” He says, waving his arm in a broad stroke to the building behind them. A gesture that makes her think, for just a moment, that he might take her hand. He drops it, though, and turns to head to the building. Christen supposes she should expect that before she assumes.

* * *

“It has been a difficult few years for us, you must understand,” Kevin says, forlorn. He runs a finger along the edge of his packet of cigarettes, and Christen can see the desire to burn himself alive drip into his fingertips. 

The office space is dolled up, despite how run down it is, and Christen keeps her eyes fixed on the surroundings instead of Kevin himself, his anxiety bright like the sun, too painful to face head-on. 

A few glossy photographs and programs boasting the stars and repertoire of seasons past line the walls. One advertising _Spring 2009 - Balanchine-Tchaikovsky_ spectacular has a print of Tobin Heath on it, softer faced in her early years. She’s nineteen, maybe, all odd angles and curved spine. Another holds Michele Wiles on cracked paper, ivory skin and ecstasy mid-way through Swan Lake.

“I do,” Christen says. She doesn’t. She hasn’t been here. She’s been working hard not to pay attention. It's better, sometimes, to perform even long after the stage lights have blinked her into obscurity. It's better, most of the time, to hear than understand. 

Kevin gives her a downturned smile. “And so, you can understand,” he pauses, “why we would have limitations, to our trust.” 

“Trust?” Christen raises her eyebrows in a practiced movement. Just on the right side of the curious to critical ratio. 

“Loyalty has been something of a… predicament, shall we say,” Kevin says. That, at least, Christen does understand. 

She hasn’t been paying attention to ABT. Hasn’t needed to take that particular dagger to her heart over and over again. However, it would be hard to ignore a principal dancer who’d begun in ABT’s talent pipeline defecting to the New York City Ballet. Especially when Kelley had called her about it specifically before she did so. 

Kelley had been one of that select group of pink tutus who had stood stage right to Christen’s life. She’d been one of the few she missed when she slammed the wings of that particular stage shut behind her. 

Her reasoning had been vague down the phone line, blurred out and crackled through an international call, Christen only processed something, something, ‘twilight of her career’, something, ‘Balanchine.’ 

What she’d neglected to mention, and what Christen couldn’t help but think would explain it all a little better, was that Kelley hadn’t been cast in a principal role since she was in the B cast for a show in the Spring before. What she hadn’t mentioned, but Christen was pretty sure was the truth, was that ABT liked its dolls until they broke. They’d felt that way about Christen. Very pretty ceramics all smudged and dirty with no great shelflife - and so they’d tossed her away. They’d done it to Tobin as well. Would probably do it to Alex, once she’d had her baby. 

Kelley’s ankles were weak, now. Tired from two decades of jump and snap. Christen didn’t blame her for finding someone else to make her sentimental. Pot. Kettle. It was hard to raise guns at mirrors, and dangerous to fire them. 

She’d known Kelley long enough, hadn’t seen any of them in enough time, that the whole thing was a little like hearing a band you’d seen in concert but hadn’t listened to in years mentioned in casual conversation. That familiar surge of possession and involvement dampened by its irrelevance, the pious nature of making it known. 

She knows why Kevin would’ve been pissed. He likes loyalty. Now Kelley’s snapped off all the bands that tied them together and laced herself up somewhere else. She doesn’t fully understand why it has to come back to bite the expensive paper of her contract, though. She keeps her face just blank enough not to betray that particular frustration. 

“And with Tobin… ” Kevin sighs, trailing off. Christen stiffens, allowing her gaze only a flicker to the poster of Tobin behind him. “Now Alex. We’re very happy for her, with the baby, of course, but” Kevin looks a long way from happy for anybody. “Well, we haven’t been soaring the rafters.” 

“I’m not interested in the politics of it, Kevin,” Christen says, “I just want to dance.”

And that isn’t true. Not exactly. It hasn’t been for a while. It's an easy route to take, though, the best explanation to give. Lying is sometimes the best thing you can do for your sanity when the truth begins to feel like a confession that would require your knees in the dust and head below the guillotine. 

“Of course,” Kevin says, in a rushed sort of way that really means _‘not at all.’_ He’d become more a politician than a dancer in the years since his retirement. “We want you dancing as well.”

Christen remembers all too well how untrue that has been in the past. She doesn’t need to dwell on it. 

“The company needs a new principal. I won’t insult both of our intelligences by acting as if we don’t know why we invited you.” It’s a tired rush, but steady. Christen is thankful for it. They both knew the next step of this dance. What came after, in the reprieve, was the uncertainty, if it was the yes or the well-traveled no. “But we plan to have a variety of soloists picking up the slack in the Spring. Fill in the principal roles until we’re certain of what ABT’s future looks like. And, it's been a long time, Christen. A lot has changed.”

Christen hears the _‘you got old_ ’ as if he’d said the words out loud instead of in the line of his brow and tilt of his assessing gaze. Ballet has been a lifelong lesson in loss and acceptance and playing Peter Pan all the days of your life. 

“I understand,” She says. Christen is gracious. Sometimes she wants to throw herself in front of traffic. Sometimes she’s sad in a nonspecific sort of way and just wants to go home, wherever that's meant to be. Whatever body or cobblestone holds it now. She’s always gracious in those feelings, though. 

Pretty and smiling and almost, almost enough. Almost is better than not enough. Is better than a lot of things she daren’t touch. A fraction off enough still isn’t satisfying though, not really. 

“It's a tough decision,” Kevin says, all fake pout and nod.

Christen nods understandingly, as polite as anything as she says “I’m sure,”

“We were hoping,” Kevin pauses, twitching in his seat, and Christen would be an idiot not to know that she won’t like whatever hope they have left to thrust upon her. She tilts her head in an inviting, interested way, eyes wide in doll-like curiosity. “That you might work with one of our former, or soon to be former, principals. Privately. To, shall we say, get back into the swing of things before the season begins in the Spring.” 

“Kelley?” Christen mocks, tilting her head. 

Kevin grimaces. “Not quite.”

The poster behind Kevin’s head seems to wink at her. _Oh_ , Christen thinks. 

A sign of a pen and an eager _‘thank you, let's discuss options’_ later, she was a principal at ABT and she was firmly back in New York, lord forgive her. She always was weak for a rafter to swing off.

* * *

Here's the thing; it's been nine years. Christen shouldn’t still have to walk around with enough guilt in her arms to kill her.

Here’s the other thing; it’s been nine years, and Tobin will always have to walk around with a knee full of surgery scars and a pirouette that doesn’t quite hold. 

Christen tries not to think about it too much. It never does her any good. 

* * *

ABT is more or less the same shapes and colours as Christen remembers as Kevin guides her through its halls, a strange kind of tour. A reintroduction to someone you never quite lost touch with. It is in some ways deeply familiar. In others, startlingly different. 

Patches in walls have been cleaned up and new posters have been added, but an institution doesn’t endure a world war only to feel the need to reinvigorate and reinvent itself entirely for no stated reason in any random decade. The dark fog of memory, where doorways loom large and wrong turns seem more pronounced, more obvious in a lesser light, is removed. 

There was only so much variation that could exist between ballet companies. Paris had it’s arched wood ceilings and rapid French instructions. ABT has a steely resolve and English complaints. In the end, it was still the same ballet. Still the same expectation. Christen beat her pointe shoes against the ground and sewed them in the same way, regardless of the stain to the floorboards or the degree of draft in the room. 

The difference came in the form of imagined realities. Or rather, their collapse. Christen had invested a lot of energy into believing ABT to be some pinnacle of perfection as a teenager. Had expected from it impossible heights, and, in losing that, an epic crash. In truth, it is like everything else. Functionally the same. Perfectly mundane. 

Christen doesn’t fully know how to reconcile that, and so she doesn’t. 

Kevin points into studios as they pass, running his fingertips along the runner of the wall as if cataloguing and sewing his steps into the path. Another day of enshrining. Christen remembers being little more than a child in this building, trying to make it count, to paint herself the colour of the wallpaper and fill the footsteps left by somebody else's shoes. It seems, for Kevin at least, that mad urge of meaning never went away - into retirement and his reign of thunderclouds. 

* * *

There’s no one much around. The end of the Christmas run of shows clears out a studio fairly rapidly. The spring season won’t start for weeks, though the rehearsals will pick up sooner rather than later. The eager and bleeding slipping back into the studio and hogging locker space first. The soloists flitting around desperately and the corps fading into the background of _nearly enough_. 

The dancers who’ve toured half the year and performed at the Metropolitan Opera the rest of it have all taken these few weeks to ease their bodies off the never-ending ache of a daily break. 

It's only the injured and the elderly around this early on. Elderly being ballerinas without the freshness of a spring lamb, holding instead the look of someone who has seen one too many to the slaughter, even swung a sacrificial knife or two in their time. 

There's the muffled sound of a piano lilting chaotically down the hall, the door to the last studio to the right swung open and rapt voices echoing out. Kevin sets his mouth as they approach it, and Christen gets the feeling she already knows what they’ll find when they arrive at that particular door. Wide-open it may be but the bars that shut it were set a long time ago.

Someone is shouting an overpowering of another, more placating voice. 

“It's not _working!_ ” the voice snaps. The rap of pointe shoes against the hardwood floor is distinctive enough, even after all these years, that Christen would have to be suffering some great agony to misidentify it. 

“Tobin-” 

A shattering, a kick, a thud, and then—“ _Fuck_!”

Christen finds a gym bag skidding to a stop at her feet in the doorway, shoes and medical tape falling from its edges as it batters up against her shins in the doorway. When she looks up, slowly, inch by inch, she finds a battered ballerina staring back at her. 

Tobin—because it is, unmistakably, _her,_ with hair falling from the front of her bun and kneepads kept in place by tape, bullets of sweat rolling from her temples—gapes at Christen, her face broken open. 

She got old, is the first thing Christen registers. The mirrored room winks back that they all did. 

Tobin looks tired in a deeper way, though. Deeper than rooms filled with dancers who had consistently moved and leaped and continued until their bodies ached and their ears bled from criticism. In a way that spelled fatigue in her bones, in her soul. There are dark rings like she’s been hit under her eyes, only deepened by the strange shadows cast by the limited light in the buildings. Christen would almost feel bad for her if it weren’t for the scowl that snaps into place at the sight of Christen.

“I don’t think kicking things is going to be helpful,” Christen says, with a nod to the bag at her feet. There’s a _‘Heath’_ stitched into one of the pockets, right below the big bold _‘American Ballet Theatre.’_ Tobin’s lips curl into a smarmy look. 

“Press.” She nods, the name a hiss of breath through her teeth. Softer than it had been before. Harsher than it started as. 

“Tobin,” Christen says, not bothering with a smile of acknowledgment. It’s wasted effort with Tobin. “Sorry about your-” she gestures vaguely at the strappings over Tobin’s knees, a hopeless movement Tobin doesn’t try to rescue her from, her eyes only darkening. 

“Why are you apologising?” It’s pointed, a little dangerous, but perfectly civil. On paper its almost politely teasing, but Christen hears something like _‘fuck you for your pity,’_ and maybe she’s wrong, maybe what Tobin means to do is lighten the mood or avoid talking about it, but she looks a little like she’d break Christen’s knee at the slightest provocation. 

Weighted glance, impatient movement, superiority complex. Same Tobin. 

So Christen shrugs and says, a little coldly, “It’s polite.” 

“Yeah. Sure.” Tobin scoffs, grabbing her drink bottle from the floor and taking a long sip. “Guess you’re just used to apologising, right?” 

The ballet mistress, Christen thinks her name is Irina, but it's hard to be sure through all of the years and distance and distaste, clears her throat pointedly. Tobin doesn’t drop her gaze, eyes burning through Christen as she swallows her water and pushes the lid of the bottle back on. It makes something hot like indignation pool in her, tugging from her intestines and demanding justice and action.

It's a dangerous desire and one she has scarcely felt in a long while. 

“I won’t bother asking whether you know each other then,” Kevin says from her shoulder, Christen glances back at him. He cuts Irina a glance, her returning nod sending her to the corner of the room to flick through a program, and gives Christen a tight-lipped smile. He seems more fazed by the glare from Tobin than the outburst and the abused bag still at their feet. 

‘Know’ is too generous of a term. ‘Generally operated in one another’s space until you couldn’t stand it anymore’ is probably more accurate. 

Christen doesn’t remember the first time she saw Tobin dance. Once you broke through the line of ‘best in the class’ while you were still young enough to dance in flat shoes and into ‘good enough to hope’ it became a rather small group at stage right. She saw the same group dance routine after routine for years. Watched them from the corner, picking mistakes, and yelled corrections to apply to her own run-through. Lost grand prix’s to most of them, beat a few. 

Tobin had been in those rooms just as frequently as anyone. Despite the grandiose expectations behind her and the way whole rooms froze to watch her jeté’s with open mouths, she was nothing special. 

Nothing special, except Christen’s eyes had burnt holes in her uncaring back as she bent over the bar, laughing and grinning at her friends despite movement that made Christen’s hips groan. Nothing special, except she’d been the Sugar Plum Fairy three seasons in a row, not counting the ill-fated ones that bookmarked it. Nothing special, except she’d danced in France, she’d danced in the Netherlands, she’d danced in Russia.

Tobin doesn’t have a start date, only an end, and now apparently not even that. 

“We were in Studio together, weren’t we, Press?” Tobin says, irritating little smile plaguing her expression, “before the princess abandoned us all for the Frog.”

“What does that even mean?” Christen can’t help the small snap in her voice. She feels like she’s sixteen again.

“Frogs are French. You, like, went to France.” 

“All frogs are not French.”  
Tobin arches an eyebrow. “You’re joking, right?” 

Kevin clears his throat, cutting a nervous glance between them. “Christen is going to be a principal here for the year, Tobin. As we discussed.”

Tobin’s eyebrows shoot to the top of her head, the lines around her mouth settling into a bizarre sort of frown. Her knees are an ugly sort of purple, all scar tissue and splintered cold. Tobin makes a face at her when she catches the direction of her gaze. 

“I think we remember that discussion differently, Kev,” Tobin says, her tone in some middle ground of contempt and indifference. “Cause, like, I said I was gonna do rehab, and you said you wanted me to teach, and then I said that was dumb. And now Princess Peach is taking up my studio. Dots aren’t super connected to me.” 

“I seem to remember a discussion about one Christen Press’ accomplishment at the Paris Opera, and the impressive nature of her success there,” Kevin’s voice changes octaves, a challenging tilt to his jaw. Tobin meets it with a sour look. Christen doesn’t know what to make of any of it. 

Kevin turns to her with a public smile. “Christen, Tobin will be assisting with your transition back into the company, along with helping run some of our classes this year.”

Christen can think of few things she’d like less than listening to Tobin—especially this angrier version— try and direct her through a show. The comment is more of a warning than anything else, though. She smiles tightly, and is nearly convincing when she says, “I’m sure that will be lovely, given her expertise.”

Tobin’s eyes narrow, and Christen smiles right back. 

“Excellent. Christen and I have some plans to discuss, Tobin, but we’ll see you soon.” Kevin says, waving himself out of the door he hadn’t ever quite entered, nodding for Christen to follow before disappearing down the hall. Tobin coughs pointedly, and Christen hesitates by the door, awaiting whatever comment is incoming. 

She looks contemplative, and for a moment, Christen thinks, stupidly, that she might say something civil. Nice, even. Then she tilts her head to the left, sneering through pale skin and chapped lips

“Your arabesque needs serious work.” She leaves. 

Theory and practice were, it seemed, going to be two very painful combatants.


	2. Old stars die, young stars burn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise for the massive delay. I'm sure the details of my incompetence do not interest you so I won't bother to make excuses. Next one shouldn't take as long.
> 
> Stay safe out there xx

Before the snow even sticks, Christen has a training plan—a schedule for each day, and thirty-six weeks of her life contracted up into a nice little bow. The press release _‘Welcome Back Christen Press, formerly of the Paris Opera Ballet, to ABT where she began her career.’_ Kelley sends the link with a simple _‘Ha!’_ typed out underneath. Her sister's call slips into voicemail, as she watches the back of her phone through each ring. She has to power down her laptop and clutch Nurse against her chest for a good fifteen minutes while she processes it. 

In the end, Nurse only digs his claws into her shoulder blade, making an agitated rumble until she lets go. It's not much reassurance, but it feels fitting regardless. 

Christen has a perfectly functional life. She showers. She makes grilled chicken and steamed vegetables half the nights of the week. Sometimes when she smiles it even feels real, like maybe a part of her means it. Not most of the time, but occasionally. 

She doesn’t strictly know what she’s doing, but if this is freefall, then it's hardly anything new. Christen has been falling from heights she tried to thrust herself to since she was five. She can take a few bumps on the way down.

Of course, there was always the chance of your pointe shoe catching and feeling those bumps split her soul, watching as blood, sweat, and tears take on something new, watching as-- 

But Christen doesn’t think about that. Not anymore. Even if Tobin is far closer than she once was. Christen knows how to keep her maybes locked up and airtight. 

She speed walks through Central Park at five in the morning, hips bobbing and knees stiffening through the cold, feeling the ache settle and the acid of her body tug. She hasn’t run since she was seven, since it became another long list of sacrifices made for any insignificant piece of betterance. She can still see Miss Jenny half out the studio door, cigarette in hand, tutting at the idea of a dancer using her legs for anything but the art they were meant to make. The hit of the ground was too harsh for their knees apparently, and so childhood had died and speed walking through cold overcrowded cities with no one much around had been born. 

She used to walk through the park with her dad, when they lived in the studio apartment they couldn’t really afford. When he relocated his life to make ballet work. Her sisters and mother having to suffer pieces of the same homesickness the two of them were left to feel - empty seats at a dining table as bitter a pill to swallow as meal plan dinners alone after hours of dancing and hours of work she hated.

They used to get hot chocolate sometimes. He’d tug at her braids. It was sweet when she was still a kid. When there was still someone to turn to at every corner. Then she grew up. 

That was her first mistake. 

The last time they spoke for more than arbitrary check-ins and birthday well wishes was six months ago. Right after the Opera performed _Giselle_ , and he sent flowers that scented the room with notes of disappointment. The card had said something like _‘repentance and pride’_ and Christen had left it in Amandine’s sock drawer when she came back to New York. For a world of so many days, they spent an awful lot of time focused on one. Christen prefers to just make it through the collective. She’s had enough of the solitary. 

Life is a door of hammered nails, and Christen is trying to hold still enough to slip through the cracks it leaves. 

The ice of the air cuts through her lungs with a sharp gasp, and Christen has to lean against a bench to catch her breath. A little girl stares as she moves past, hand in hand with her Grandfather. It's all Christen can do to watch her back. 

She almost misses the surprised snap off, “Christen?” behind her. 

Christen glances over her shoulder, one hand still gripping the edge of the bench trying to force air into her lungs, seeking out the source of the confused call. Her gaze lands on a stroller and an elegant posture. 

Alex. 

The last time she’d seen was nine years ago. It’d been nine and a half since they spoke. Here she was, with her hair and smile fixed, still as drawn as she was when they were thirteen. The only difference is the child in the stroller she’s holding onto with one hand, beady-eyed and blinking back at Christen like she also knows the weight between them on this Tuesday morning in Central Park. 

“Alex. Hi,” She says, clearing her throat around her breathlessness. Alex raises an eyebrow.

“So you really are back,” Alex says simply. There’s no question to it, but Christen feels like she has to answer something anyway. 

Christen nods, “For the season, yes.” 

“I thought it might be a joke,” Alex’s gaze is analytical, sliding through Christen. It feels like she’s being read out loud. As if she was patterning out all of her missteps and misspellings. Christen feels like a joke. “When Tobin told me, well, we all assumed you’d never show your face at ABT again.”

Christen feels like she’s swallowed concrete, “But here I am.” 

“Yes,” Alex hums, raising an eyebrow almost, but not completely, playfully, “Bold choice.” 

Bold is not the word for how Christen feels. Bold is the word for red paint across a wall. Bold is the word for a woman that thrusts herself across a stage for her applause without hesitance of the fall. Bold is the name of red lipstick and fearless love.

Christen is a traditionalist without a return ticket holding a hundred needles of guilt as they inch closer and closer to her heart. It doesn’t quite fit the definition of _‘bold_.’

Christen heaves a sigh and gives Alex the most placating look she can, “I’m not trying to take your spot if that's what you’re worried about.”

“Of course you aren’t.” Alex rolls her eyes like it's an impossibility. Christen might be offended if the lesson wasn’t already so hammered. “You’re just being cruel to Tobin.”

“I am not being _cruel_.” Christen hisses, narrowing her eyes and lowering her voice a little to avoid the sharp looks of the passersby. 

Alex gives her an unimpressed look. “So, what? Is this some redemption tour? Because I’d call that cruel.”

“This has nothing to do with Tobin. This is just ballet.” Christen says in a measured tone, stiffening. It is. It’s always been. It’s a dance and not enough and a closing curtain, trying to bask in the beauty before it swings shut. 

Alex purses her lips. “It was just ballet last time, and look what happened there.” 

The baby fusses in the pram, and Christen smiles down at her as Alex moves to roll her back and forth, a soothing little movement. “I’m not trying to hurt anyone, Lex, I just wanted to come home.” 

Alex looks at her considerably for a long moment, still rolling the stroller back and forth. A long time ago Christen would have considered her an almost friend. A long time ago Christen wanted to be better than her. Why is it, now, that when the lights are all left for her - Alex gone, Kelley gone, Tobin… well, Tobin was a more complicated story but backstage nonetheless - that they don’t seem as bright.

Christen feels shadowed, even in a glare that washes out her skin and turns her softest edges into jagged snares. 

“It’s good to see you, Chris.” Alex sighs, eventually. “But this isn't your home. Not after what you did.”

* * *

The studio is almost entirely empty when Christen arrives, an hour before class begins for the day, filled only by the closed door of a conference room and the green of the upstairs lockers. Christen’s gym bag used to fill one of them for twelve hours of the day, every day. Her locker was battered but always carefully closed, while across the room another was left to swing open, the snapback and half-drunk smoothie bare for the world to see. That disregard used to infuriate her to no end. 

She used to try a little more vigorously, and care in a different way. On the edge of success, everything feels urgent. On the downward spiral, none of it seems to matter all that much. She’d like to start again; to bulldoze this hill of the endless climb. She can’t. She’s not sure she’d go through with it even if she was able. So, instead, she hikes up and over once again. There are worse charges to have to her name, and lighter boulders to push. 

Curses can be blessings. Better off can be terrible and cruel and still the best there is to hold in discoloured hands. 

The studio dedicated to full company classes, something Christen is a little suspect of seeing so near the holidays, is unlocked, at the very least, and she drops her gym bag in the corner, positioning herself by one of the back mirrors. She feels tired. She feels urgent. In the freckled mirror, she looks the supreme image of smug indifference. Calm and agile and unaware. A theatre in any empty room, no crowds left to clap. 

Christen moves through choreography, testing the limits of her body and focusing on its little twitches and tinges, stiff angled pirouettes reflected back in the mirror. Thinks of nothing but the way it aches. She’s a little rusty on her turns, slowing in the final movements, her lines loosening. She can spot the unraveling in the mirror, and she hates it. She catalogues the improvements needed for her arabesque, hates that the criticism holds someone else's voice now. 

Her rhythm is still good, though, her timing still in touch. A Christmas spent alone packing her Paris apartment into boxes and preparing to face the ghosts of New York, hadn’t done her too much damage.

She’d spent more than twenty years caring so dangerously and full chestedly that a week of deluge and a decade of having her stomach carved out over and over and sewn back in each time her thoughts wandered weren’t enough to stop her. 

Ballet was a turning, driving, black passion pushing her higher into the sky and further across the stage, ligaments groaning and a ballet master insisting she go again, go higher, go more gracefully.

That was, perhaps, the sonnet of Christen’s life. A small song of 14 lines worth of breathless noise and exertion for the sake of something so fleeting. No matter how badly the cold stiffened her fingers or the exertion tore at her muscles, it was that tiny glimpse of beauty that kept her at it. That, and the obligation. 

The spring season won’t start for weeks yet, but the company is, in the immortal words of Kevin’s panic-stricken rambling during one of their phone calls _“beset by a tragedy so unimaginable, Tchaikovsky is fumbling at his piano.”_ It was perhaps a little hyperbolic for an injury to a dancer who’d been one knee out of the door for years and events they’d brought upon themselves, but she supposes she could indulge his panic a little. 

Christen’s pointe shoes clatter across the polished wood in sharp raps, and it strikes her that she’s never been quite so lonely in her life. Not even in Paris when she had no one but herself to love or blame.

Artistic and athletic. Brutally alone. Violent in every step, without a bruise to show for it.

One step forward, two steps back had never been her style. For as long as there had been adrenaline in her veins and art in her movements there had been dedication. With dedication came sacrifice. Sometimes, it was enough. Sometimes, it wasn’t. Sometimes, when she was at the Opera, Christen lay awake and stared at the water stain on the ceiling from when her upstairs neighbours overflowed their standing room bathtub and wondered which side of the line she sat on.

The studio comes alive gradually, a few dancers creeping back from their holidays and slugging their way through the return to the season. None of them were ever allowed to get too out of shape. Christen remembers many holidays filled with green beans and quinoa while everyone around her dined on turkey and swam in gravy boats. 

Still, the fatigue of the holiday season could set into your bones as easily as tearing away the wrapping of your nicest gifts. 

The room is tired, closer to empty than full, and still, Christen feels a layer of her skin shed and replenish. She drags herself through the needlework of the streets, has moved across oceans, and would again, for this. A learned return to the sacrament of her dedication. Ballet isn’t as peaceful as it once was but she’s found that there is comfort in the knowledge that she will never be at rest without it. 

There’s something soothing to the air gasped right after a chokehold. 

Christen sips at her water bottle and takes a seat on the floor as the room fills and bustles, stretching her legs out ahead of her. One of the ballet masters is frowning at his sheet music from the front of the room. They all look gloomy these days. 

The whole studio is still tingling with the rumours of shattered bones and blood drops on the stage, the echo of hoarse screams of pain practically painted into the wall. A shudder of a final bow at the final performance of the Christmas season weeks ago. January, typically a point of revival, is marred by loss. Christen suspects it’ll haunt them all a little while longer. 

It’s certainly haunted _her_ long enough. She’s tired of being sick over it. It’d had ebbed away for a while, out of sight out of mind. It's bright and here and ready for its tortured return now, though. _Not after what you_ did painted across the walls and shining back in the floor-length mirrors.

She’s broken from her thoughts by Crystal plopping down beside her with an expectant smile and a bright pink dance bag with ‘you’re a star’ written on it in sequins. It almost makes Christen laugh aloud. 

“Hey, stranger.” Crystal grins, as accusing as she’s capable of being, but undercut by the glee in her eyes. Christen returns a somewhat dimmed version of the smile.

She had arrived into her life in a burst of energy and aggressively beautiful relevé’s and never really came down from those heights. They’d been in Studio Company together, Crystal making the cut in just as Christen was hoping to make a leap out. Despite the handful of years between them, a gap that mattered at fourteen in a way that felt monumental, they’d been fast friends. A side effect, perhaps, of being surrounded by bright white tutus in a sport you could hardly fill a hand with names of PR approved “diverse” Ballerinas. 

Crystal had been lucky enough to have been born and raised in a ballet city, luckier still to make it far enough up ABT’s ladder to validate staying, though Christen doubted that had ever been a question for her. Christen hasn’t had either of those things going for her. 

They’d lost touch, Christen a timezone and a life experience away, Crystal busy glittering with enough overlooked gusto to draw reviewers' attention away from the prima ballerinas and onto her. 

“Hi, Crys,” she says, serenely, bending a little further over her outstretched legs and feeling her hips shift into submission. “Nice bag.”

Crystal rolls her eyes. “Still the same, then? France didn’t improve your style?”

“I’m complimenting _your_ style.” 

“No. You’re not.”

“I just-”

“You’d have to actually be speaking French for me to miss the sarcasm in that, Pressi.” Crystal sniffs pointedly, eyebrows raising as she snaps the top of her pointe shoes against the ground, bending it to the position she wants.

“Then your French skills have seriously declined,” Christen mutters, fighting off a smile. Between ballet and French instructors, they had enough words to get themselves through a day in a studio, at least. Even if Christen hadn’t managed enough for friends until years into her time at the Opera. That was better left unmentioned. 

Crystal sniffs, “You’ve declined.”

Christen huffs a laugh, pushing forward over her knees as her back makes a slight popping sound. 

“It’s good to see you again, Pressi. I wasn’t sure we’d ever see you again for a minute there.” Crystal says, a little too quiet, a little too sincere. 

Christen nods jerkily and swallows, “Well, here I am.”

“Here you are” Crystal peers at her a little too intently and Christen turns back to the cool purple of her under oxygenated knees. 

The silence hangs for only long enough for Crystal to spread her shoes and elastic bands in a pile around them, seeking out her ribbons and insoles. The trance of regret easing a little as Crystal glances around them, eyeing some of the younger girls in the opposite corner before she leans in with wide, horror-stricken eyes and says, far too enthusiastically, “Did you hear about Tobin?” 

“It’s why I’m here.” Christen shrugs. Loathe as she is to admit it, much of the contract she’s inked to dance here was written on the destroyed parts of Tobin’s knee. 

“No,” Crystal rolls her eyes, “Doctors said it might be permanent this time. They’re saying she could be out for good.” 

“Oh?” Christen hums, stretching forward and resting her weight down into her elbows. Her hip flexors tug just slightly, not enough to hurt, but enough to notice. She’ll need to focus some attention on rolling them out later. 

“She’ll need two surgeries. Even then…” Crystal shakes her head pityingly, waving Julie over with half attention as she enters the studio. 

Christen doesn’t really care about Tobin’s surgery schedule. She crinkles her forehead sympathetically and tightens her mouth somewhat performatively. “That's too bad, really.”  
Julie plops down next to Crystal, grinning between them in greeting as Crystal gives her a one-armed hug. Christen waves with one hand, forearms still pressed into the rigged hardness of the floor.

It's dusty, as studio floors always are, broken in by layers of paint and the thudding of shoes. One of the ballet masters is holding a program against his mouth across the room, deep lines of discontent across his face. Christen gets the feeling.

“Long time no see, Pressi,” Julie says with a broad grin stretching out her face. 

Christen smiles back a little tightly, “Hey, JJ.” 

“What’re we talking about?” Julie asks, tugging a bobby pin from her hair and sticking it between her teeth as she loops her hair into a tighter, neater version of the windswept bun she’d entered with. Christen has always thought Julie looked a little like the ballerina in every little girl's jewelry box, blonde and pretty and perfectly content to spin in the same circle to the same tune every time someone opened her up and commanded it. 

“Tobin,” Crystal says. Julie crinkles her nose like she, for one, actually cares.

“So sad. She was so good.” She was _okay_. “I heard she could be back for the Fall season, though.” Julie offers, glancing up from stitching ribbons into her pointe shoes. 

“Jules, she’s _done_.” Crystal insists. Christen tips her head in agreement. She isn’t a doctor, but she is a dancer, and the odds of someone whose knee had looked and sounded the way Tobin’s had - someone who has at least two surgeries in their calendar for the coming months - well, they’re not good. 

“But she’s helping teach this season. She wouldn’t be teaching if she didn’t have a chance. It's Tobin. She’d be surfing or something.” Julie says. 

“What does she have to teach us?” Christen mutters. “We’ve all been in the same classes, same shows. She has no expertise in actually teaching, and last I saw she can hardly follow directions. We’d learn more if she did go surfing.” 

Crystal shoots Christen a tight-lipped and unimpressed look. Christen just pulls herself up and grabs an exercise band out of her bag, looping it over the base of her foot and rolling through her ankle, ball, toe, and back again. She’s stiffer than she should be and resolves to wear leg warmers for barre. 

Julie scrunches her forehead up considerably. “I don’t think you actually _can_ surf on a knee you can’t dance on, I was just making a point.” 

“I think you can, it's like, the suspension or whatever,” Crystal says.

Julie rolls her eyes. “You’re a dancer, you have to know that isn’t true.” 

“The point is that we don’t need her help.” Christen interrupts, knowing the beginnings of a long-winded and pointless argument when she sees one, shrugging one shoulder, the exercise band tugging with the movement. She feels cruel in the winter air and irritated by her brief interactions with the dancer in question and Alex’s accusations. “No one needs some prima donna that’s already washed up trying to justify her existence.” 

They’re interrupted by a firm cough. Julie's eyes go wide Crystal hisses through her teeth in a _‘well, shit’_ gesture. Christen knows what she’s going to see before she turns. 

“Are you done?” It's a perfectly relaxed question, and when Christen turns her head, Tobin is behind them, propped up by crutches, her hair a half bun at the back of her head. She looks equal parts passive and enraged as if each emotion is waging war for dominance; one insisting she stay calm, one trying to burn the world and the studio with it. Christen is a little afraid of her.

She’s wearing a snapback over knotted hair and a $200 coat over sweatpants. Christen feels like sinking to the bottom of a lake and feeling the water whisper goodnight. Would rather any death than watching Tobin like this, all these years later. Would rather anything than having to see her at all. 

Except - that isn’t quite true. 

Christen is a butcher of her own heart. She wants to dance. She wants not to feel so bad all the time. Seeing Tobin is just a condition of that. Seeing Tobin is just a cleaver in her chest.

In the other corner, some of the younger dancers cut them uncomfortable glances. 

“Cause, I can leave, if you wanna keep going, but, thing is,” Tobin glances at her left wrist exaggeratedly, no watch in sight, “We sorta have to start at some point, and you all need the practice, so.” 

A cold weight settles in Christen’s stomach. It tastes a little too much like guilt. Whatever she feels about Tobin, she hadn’t meant for her to hear it. Picking at someone else's stitches had never been who she was. Tobin glares at her in a way that's unforgiving, and it’s all Christen can do to remain steady. 

“We’re done,” Christen says, firmly as she meets Tobin’s eye. Tobin’s lips turn down, a glimmer of teeth behind an irritated frown. “You don’t have to be rude.” 

Tobin huffs a laugh, “Yeah, sure.” 

There's a shade of the Tobin Christen knew when they were kids. Casual and self-assured. The anger, bitter knifepoint, well, that's entirely new. Christen doesn’t fully blame her, suspects she would turn the whole world in on itself if she was suddenly assured she’d never dance again. It’s still irritating. 

Tobin is staring at her, a harshness to her face. Her eyes are rawly open, though. Violent swirls of anger and kindness and pain. She looks like she could cry or kill a man. There are little pinches around her eyes like she’s studying something intently as she takes in Christen down on the floor below her. She has brown eyes. Christen had forgotten that.

Christen looks away. 

“I hope you’re warmed up,” Tobin says at last and turns to hobble back to the front of the room where theres a chair and a stereo waiting for her. It’s meant to be decisive, but the effect is somewhat ruined by the rubber on metal sound of her crutches. She takes her seat and the room scampers to attention.

Crystal turns to Christen with raised eyebrows. “Way to make friends.”

“I think that ship sailed a long time ago,” Christen mutters, pushing herself from the floor and shaking out a leg. She tugs at the fabric of her leotard until it sits properly over her chest. _Not after what you did_. “It’s not like I’m wrong, anyway.”

“I don’t know. She is really good.” Julie hums. Crystal tips back onto the heels of her hands like she isn’t bothered either way. 

Christen tosses her exercise band back into her bag and tugs on a pair of knitted leg warmers, torn in places and beginning to stretch a little much, ready to start dancing and be done with it. She shrugs as she secures them and says, “She was.” 

Her stomach feels sickly and aware of the pinpricks of eyes on the back of her head, but she ignores them as she makes her way into first position. 

Ballet, at least, demands enough of her that she doesn’t have to think too much about it. About any of it. That has always been its most violent delight, that Christen is never under any obligation to be anything but perfect when it comes to dancing. Not human, not feeling, not kind. Only perfect in movement and art and expression. She doesn’t have to feel any of it, though. Just has to do it.

If it's guilt that boils her belly, then Christen doesn’t need to assess it. 

Her legs are a strong line of muscle. Hard and rigid through soft, light tights. Christen sometimes thinks she is more machine than she is a woman. Tinkered with and designed to have the audience amused and merry. Left dormant in the dressing room with only herself to stare at in lit mirrors until next they call on her.

There isn’t a gentle touch in the world for the mechanical, not even amongst this soft-spoken art form.

Dancing lets her banish all thought of damaged knees and focus purely, narrow-mindedly, on technique. Christen barely hears anything when she’s dancing. Just the thrum of movement and the cut of instruction. The ache of her muscles and the beads of sweat through her leotard, the blaring heater mollifying the stiff tension of the room, her muscles flexing through each incremental movement, one lift of control after another.

It's freeing, in a way, to be so entirely consumed by movement. To have nothing but the feel of cylindrical wood under her right hand and her leg raising up, out, forward, knees a smooth shift as she drops down, toes strong as she rises to the pointe. 

She keeps a catalogue of everything she does wrong. Tobin points _‘elbows’_ , and _‘relax the eyebrows’_ at her and she corrects with a chapstick smile and glazed over eyes. Unseeingly fixed on a point of the wall, her only vision in the movement of every body part. Tobin says _‘stronger’_ and _‘straighten’_ in flat intones from where she’s sprawled across her little stools, crutches lent against the wall next to her, and it's all Christen can do not to roll her eyes. 

They run through a variation of half mapped out steps, the corps de ballet getting their legs under them for the new season, the soloist and principals in attendance, a smaller group, on the whole, flexing their way through new steps and new sheet music. The clack of pointe shoes against the floor louder than the music. 

It feels a little like Tobin’s tone is harder when she addresses Christen. A subtle shift from an _‘up’_ at one of the younger girls, Christen thinks her name is Mal, to the _‘use some control’_ at Christen. Small, but biting. 

She tries to ignore it. Tries to ignore the way Tobin watches her like she’s waiting for a mistake. 

She tries to focus on the good part of the equation. She’s a principal dancer for ABT. On a temporary fix, perhaps, but the title is hers nonetheless. Finally. All this time and here it is. One great wall she’s been scrambling up for years and now the rubble lays at her feet, greener pastures unfolding before her eyes. She doesn’t allow the shadows the nearby trees cast to ruin the shine of the dew on the blades of grass or the way the air is sharp with absolution. 

It’s not—it can’t be bitter. It can’t be disappointing that it’s like this. That anyone could point to a single instance unrelated to her own talent and say _‘well, that’s what did it.’_ Christen wants, needs, desires, for this to have been hers. In so many ways, it is. In so many ways, it isn’t. Which is maybe the most infuriating part of it all. That Christen can’t claim this with both hands and all her might, because a golden string is attached to someone else, something else. 

It’s hers, and it’s secondhand. 

She’s greedy, perhaps, but she wants to be gluttonous, so she counts the acidic disappointment that rolls over her tongue and is promptly swallowed with the rest of her excess saliva as some form of improvement. 

Christen falters on half a step in a routine from Don Quixote and the music stops with a click. 

She huffs a breath, dropping from her pointes. Crystal, beside her, does the same, hands going to rest on her hips as they catch their breath. It’s a technical dance and they’re out of season. Christen knows the critique before it comes, she can see it in the lines of Tobin’s stuttered crossing of the room until she’s inches away. 

“You’re dancing without a soul.” Is all Tobin says, decisive, eyes harsh as they glide down the lines of Christen’s body. Christen bristles. She’s never liked criticism, but she’d learned to deal with it. From Tobin… it’s something else entirely. 

She just nods, though, cleanly. Swallowing the spit that's built in her mouth from the exertion. Tobin watches her for half a minute, eyes wandering across her face. Seeking out a reaction, most likely. She probably finds one. Can probably see the flush in her cheeks and the clench in her jaw, the way her fingernails dig into her palm. Christen can’t do much to cool that, though, and so she just meets her gaze, flicker for flicker. 

Christen’s soul bleeds into the satin of her pointe shoes. It was built in these rooms and through these steps. Tobin doesn’t need to know that once upon a time Christen only felt its presence when she was dancing. Those days are gone now. 

After a moment, Tobin shifts, lips twitching in something between annoyance and a smile. “So. Work on it,” she says. 

“I will.” Christen says. Crystal clears her throat awkwardly. 

“Right,” Tobin says. Christen thinks she might be really bad at this whole teaching thing. Which isn’t, necessarily, shocking, but is still sort of dully amusing. A little like a raindrop hitting a puddle. Odd, enough to prompt a huff of air from your lips when you’ve had a long day and there's an itch under your skin that begs for any sort of joy, but not, ultimately, remarkable. A joke hidden amongst it, but a puddle and a raindrop nonetheless. 

Tobin falters half a step and then turns, haltingly, to wander back to her seat by the door. She hobbles a little on her knee, but she seems a little like she might turn back around at any moment like she’s two steps off a return just to say whatever odd little remark she’s gotten into her head. She doesn’t, though, and Christen can’t help the strange rush of warmth she gets when she settles back down. 

She categorises it as anger and promptly moves back into second position. 

By the time Tobin waves them off, the piano halting on a half beat, Christen’s covered in sweat and sufficiently warm. Icicle beads cutting through hot skin under her leotard, her joints moving with ease even through any of the pain. 

She’ll need her knee acupunctured soon, the joint just beginning to swell. Years of scar tissue remembering to bother her now that the snow is sticking and the Christmas lights are all coming down. The clotted wood beneath her feet and the beat of enforced satin shoes beneath her tickling at it until it laughs back. A massage might be in order too, the tension raising her shoulders up to her ears. 

It's been a long few months. It's been a long thirty years. She’s nowhere near close to done, even as her body requests that she push less, pull lighter. Christen tugs her leg warmers higher up her knees and resolves to visit the masseuse upstairs after class.

It’s only a five hour session. They’re not quite in season and no one has quite been cast in anything yet. It’s a scrambling company battling a recent injury and trying to prevent more that has lured Christen in, but she can’t say she hadn’t been well aware of the honey trap when she stepped into it. With this much uncertainty in the company, they’re not going anywhere for anything, and so Christen has only five hours to put herself through the wringer in hopes of brilliance. Almost a holiday compared to the nine of Spring. 

She longs for a bath and a massage, to roll out her legs and falls asleep, but she knows if she has any chance at not throwing herself off a skyscraper in frustration by mid-season she has to swallow her pride and fix the root of the glare Tobin seems to have designed for her. 

Studio 6 begins to empty, but Christen just pats Crystal once on the back and waves her a goodbye, promising to get a cab home. 

Christen lingers by the door, leaning against cold, painted brick, giving stiff smiles to the dancers that trail out and down the corridor into the cold air outside. There are posters of past performances lined along the walls. Tobin’s face peers from a few. Christen’s name is on none. 

The real Tobin is scrolling through her phone, still on her stool. Her injured leg is laid out ahead of her, stiff and awkward, but the other is looped around the chair leg. There are holes in her jeans, gaping and artfully ripped to expose strength that only came from a lifetime on pointe shoes. 

When the room is empty for everyone but the two of them, Tobin glances up with a sigh, eyebrows furrowed together “Can I help you, Press?” 

Christen falters, ‘ _sorry’_ too medicine sweet on her tongue, “I wanted to ask about the private tuition Kevin wanted you to give me.” 

“What about it?” Tobin mutters, thumbs sliding across her phone screen. 

Christen has no idea. She doesn’t really want it to start at all. Doesn’t think she can bear it. It’s not like she has much of a choice, though. 

“When did you want to start?” She settles on eventually. Tobin’s glances at her with an unimpressed look.

“That’s why you’re keeping me here after class? You know they invented, like, email addresses for this stuff.” 

Tobin has always been on the edge of antagonism and humour. Christen has always known which way she sways. The comment pokes at her, and Christen has to bite her tongue to stay nice. Nine hour days would have hell to pay if Tobin spent all her time tossing words she’d only mostly meant back in her face.

Professional requirements kept her plastered in the doorway, a cement apology in her mouth

“I was going to say sorry,” Christen says, stiltedly, trying to cool the grinding of teeth she can hear in it. “We shouldn’t have been talking about you behind your back.”

Tobin shrugs, switching off her phone and letting it drop onto her thigh. “It’s fine. I don’t care.” 

“I was sorry about the injury,” Christen says. She means it. In a way, it would have been easier had she not. Had it been simply a matter of a suddenly empty spot, then perhaps she wouldn’t have minded so much. That wasn’t what had happened, though. Christen feels sorry and scared into her blood, and sorry doesn’t fix much at all, so she clings to the fear like a slowly sinking liferaft. She feels sore about a lot of things to do with Tobin and her knees. This one’s a little duller. 

“Yeah.” Tobin nods. Her face is closed off completely. Christen doesn’t pretend to believe she knows Tobin’s every expression after nine years and a blood splatter, but like this, she’s completely inaccessible. Her jaw works, eyes burning as they meet Christen’s.

“And I’m sure your partner was too,” Christen offers. She imagines second worse to seeing your own career slip through the space of your fingers in ribbons of snapped ligaments would be looking down on someone else as they lost everything, knowing you were the one that had dropped them from that great height. Christen is, for that, grateful not to ever have to catch anyone from her position. 

Tobin’s eyebrows furrow together, mouth turning down. “Dom?”

Christen shrugs, she supposes so. She hadn’t paid that much attention to who was dancing the cavalier beyond the feeling of horror they must have had when Tobin slipped from the heights of the Sugar Plum Fairy and hit a knee she’d been nursing for years hard enough to rule her out for good. 

“He’s fine. We’re good.” Tobin says. She peers at Christen like she’s trying to understand a complicated equation. 

“I just know it can be strange when it’s not your fault,” Christen says. She’d sprained her ankle when Mathieu had lost his grip on her in her second year at the Opera and lost half a season to pained positions for it. The specifics of despising yourself right along with someone else were well-tread. 

Tobin’s lips tighten. “Well, who's to say it wasn’t my fault, after all, I am just a washed-up prima donna. Probably can’t be trusted to tie my own pointe shoes.” 

So much for an apology accepted and a litany of carelessness. 

“You are good. I shouldn’t have said that.” Christen says because the thunderous look in Tobin’s eyes doesn’t spell forgiveness and the knot in Christen's stomach won’t let her walk away. 

Christen is gracious. Sometimes she wants to throw herself into traffic or get on the first bus she can find and see where it takes her, see if it's somewhere that can finally settle this untouchable itch in her bones, but she is always bound together with pretty ribbons by those feelings. This can’t be an exception. 

“Am I?” Tobin asks, head tilting back. A strand of her hair falls across her cheekbone, little wires of it sticking to her nose as it falls. 

“Everyone knows you are,” Christen says, shaking her head. Tobin quirks an eyebrow at her, arms folded over her chest and yet still completely unbothered in posture.

“Do they?”

“Your name is all over the place,” Christen says. There are framed reviews throughout this building that are 80% composed of the name _‘Heath’_ , the other 20% made up of words and phrases like _‘precise’_ , _‘technically brilliant’,_ and _‘a great.’_

“How many buildings around here say Trump?” Tobin says with the calm and assured nature of someone used to winning arguments. Christen can’t even fault her that but screw her because it’s not the point. “Names aren’t everything.”

“Do you just want me to compliment you in new and exciting ways, is that what this is about?” Christen can’t help the tight irritation in her chest. Especially when faced with a still leisurely splayed out Tobin. “I’m not - I’m not trying to be cruel. I know that it might seem that way to you, but I’m really not.

Tobin grins at her, lazy and even, ruthlessly casual. Her eyes bite through the sensitive skin around Christen’s throat. “I don’t think about you enough for it to seem like _anything_ , Press.”

Christen gapes at her, tries desperately to form any type of a response that doesn’t sound like that of a flush-faced school child, enraged on the playground. Nothing comes to her, and she stands awkward in her leotard with rage and irritation and coursing frustration thick in her blood. 

She thinks of Tobin’s injury, of the slide of the brace across her knee and the dint in the stage from the force with which she hit it. Thinks of the quiver that must have run through Dom’s arms and the slip of well-worn leather against the loose bead and the loose stage before they came crashing down. Thinks of the way New York had looked from the window of the plane, like a little glimpse from the doors of heaven, how Christen had descended as Tobin rose up through the gates. Tobin looks at her with enough contempt to tear the world and towns apart through her smile. 

Tobin looks at her like she’s been thinking about it just as much as Christen has for nine long years of rehab and regret. 

“You don’t blame Dom,” Christen says. 

“No.”

“But you still blame me,” Christen says, like a challenge that Tobin raises right to, her face going drawn and pale. _Bingo_. 

She swallows once, twice. Her jaw works and Christen can feel the nerve she’s struck like a trigger beneath her pulse point. “We start tutoring next Thursday. You can go now.” 

There’s no triumph in it. Christen would like to press on that nerve until it stutters out beneath her hands. Instead, she leaves with a short nod, and feels Tobin’s eyes, phone forgotten in her lap, all the way out of the building.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my [tumblr](https://softnoirr.tumblr.com/), where you can [ask questions and seek answers on this fic](https://softnoirr.tumblr.com/ask) to your heart's content and my delight.


	3. All of my enemies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to memoized, writersblock109 for beta reading and to gratefulnblissful for assuaging the Drama of my worries.   
> sorry for how much of a liar I have made of myself in every single chapter note: I've been in and out of hospital but should be able to settle back into a functional routine and hopefully not keep leaving it long stretches now. 
> 
> stay safe xx

Christen has a recurring dream. The same one since she was twenty-one, painted in different shades across her eyelids each time it rears its head. 

It goes like this:

She’s running, but she doesn’t know why. Behind her is something large and impenetrable, blocking the path as she explodes away from it, effectively shutting off any and all routes home. The home that had been so solid and unbroken in the possibility of return. Christen doesn’t know why, but she knows with the sort of certainty that feels ancient, long built into her fabric and DNA, that she doesn’t want to so much as look back, let alone turn that way.

So she doesn’t. She runs. Sometimes she runs forever, with only a looming fear and increasing heart rate, this awful thing behind her, unnamed and unfelt, nipping at her heels until she’s all but lost her ankles. 

Sometimes, she sprints down a staircase, dodging and jumping across crystal balls all too slowly as she tries to make her way down, away from whatever it is that she’s leaving. 

Christen never quite knows where she is, no matter how many times she dreams it. With each movement, she feels closer to an answer, and with each answer, she feels further from where she began. It's tormenting, torturous. Familiar. 

She trips, and it’s like spiraling out and falling to earth. Like plummeting from impossible heights and digging out from a grave all at once. It feels like when she was twenty, and she kissed a girl, a girl who wore red lipstick every day of the year and tasted like peppermint, in the back of a bar— just four months into their friendship. The first girl she’d ever kissed, though not the first to have her sobbing on the street corner phone.

The unmoving magic of rightness. An inevitable collapse of knowing yourself more deeply than you’d like. 

She trips and it feels like death. Death and St Peter’s gate. 

She trips, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because suddenly she’s still and upright at the top of the staircase, staring down at a nimble figure splayed across the stairs she’d been on, droplets of red mixing with the crystal balls. 

They look up, eyes burning, and Christen has nothing to say to that. 

Behind her, someone says her name, and Christen wakes up.

That’s the one thing that never changes. Christen wakes up and remembers the hospital, Kevin’s office, and the taxi that had almost hit her as she’d fled both. Christen wakes up, and remembers and regrets and stews in the  _ ‘I didn’t do it’  _ no one ever believes; not even her own subconscious. 

Christen supposes that guilt has never been about truth. 

She’s awake before her alarm but she waits until it blares into the cold quiet of her apartment and Nurse groans against her hips, sharp claws digging through the covers and into her flesh. 

She has the dream every night for a week, and she isn’t sure if she wants it to stop. 

* * *

Christen had forgotten, somehow, how quickly the weeks went by at ABT. The schedules are so full there's hardly time to think, let alone await anything. Her days are so entirely consumed by the movements and ticking of her body it hardly makes sense to put energy elsewhere. 

It was different at the Opera, though only a little. There was still the pressure, still the timetable, but with it the lingering sense of establishment. A world of people who had won their way into the best and no had no trouble fighting to stay there. A world of hard work and short steps. ABT was all without the option of nothing. You didn’t get to pick and choose. You just did. 

Christen likes it, just a little. Maybe she is a masochist, after all. 

Christen goes to class, rolls through her stretches, stiffens through pirouettes, jetes, and releves. She fits the crease of her ankle over the pine coloured gloss of the barre and flexes the arch of her foot into a perfect point. Her body is more machine than flesh and blood, and some days she wonders if they will find metal when they eventually cut her open and dissect her insides. Without her body to cooperate with the insistence of the room around it, Christen doesn’t know what she's for.

She eats salmon for dinner on a Tuesday. She sits on the stiff floor of her living room, right below the window, so she can balance her plate on her knee and feed Nurse pieces of fish from her fingertips. His claws dig into her thigh enough to leave a little piece of flesh floating in the wind when he leans across her for more. Christen can’t find it in herself to mind. 

On Wednesday she eats grilled chicken and steamed vegetables over the sink, her leg propped up into a stretch over the edge of it. Nurse watches her from the window sill with a glare that can only be construed as judgment. 

She roasts vegetables and tosses them into a salad on Thursday. She sits on the couch she assembled by herself in an apartment silent but for the scrape of metal on wood and fabric on skin to eat it, her feet in a tub of ice to ease the ache of the day. 

On Friday she turns down Crystal’s invitation to go out for drinks. She drinks a bottle of wine by herself, placates the patheticness by stretching into a splits while doing so. Nurse bumps his head against the wine glass and ruins her security deposit in one fell swoop. She drinks straight from the bottle after that. It seems the only logical choice. 

She dances well enough. Tries to love it. Fails. Settles for loving Nurse. Settles for tiring herself enough that it doesn’t matter that she falls asleep to the sound of helicopters and the ACL-sized hole in her stomach instead of someone else's breathing, or even a sense of satisfaction on the pillow next to her. 

It would be nice to have more. It would be nice to have a lot of things. But then again, “nice” was never enough for her; anyway, she shouldn’t be so maudlin to miss it now. 

She settles for less. It's a well-practiced hobby of hers. 

She keeps having the dream. She keeps dancing. 

Without warning, through it, the Thursday morning of her tuition with Tobin arrives unbidden and unwanted after a week and change of back-breaking work and avoiding Tobin at any and all costs. A task easier said than done. 

Tobin, who she had been unsuccessfully attempting to avoid since her ill-fated attempt at an apology. Tobin, who still owned ballet in New York, but whose email has the ABT logo, with  _ ‘Tobin Heath, artistic consultant’  _ and a blank space for office hours beside it at the bottom. 

Christen used to think she’d hold a title like that one day. That managing the ins and outs of the movements her body could no longer perform would be the closest to the high of performing she’d find after she ticked past thirty-five and ran out of chance. 

She wonders how it feels, to see it before you’re done. To see it and know that it had never even been the fallback dream. She wonders if it's better or worse when it comes before your time. Mostly, she wonders if Tobin hurts like she does. 

If Christen had been told that she could never dance again, bar two surgeries and a public fall from grace, she would’ve been on the first train home. Wherever that was these days. 

That's where they’re different. Christen flees from grief. Tobin lives in it. 

Tobin, who blamed Christen. 

Christen tries not to think about it so vehemently that it's almost the only thing on her mind, and wades through the city’s never-ending traffic—which won’t bend or break for midnight or mornings or even her own personal crisis—towards ABT, a cup of coffee in her hand a gym bag over her shoulder. 

New York is fine. But that’s all it is, as she darts down its alleys and takes a taxi to the same curb she arrived at. A resting point between opportunity and adventure, neither of which hold happiness in the palm of their hands. Christen is beginning to believe that she won’t find that particular ingredient anywhere.

She is struck, at random intervals, by the intense need to  _ go home _ . In the middle of a street, in the middle of the day, at night tucked into her bed. All she wants is a plane to hop on and a crook of comfort to curl up in. That place doesn’t exist, though.

She feels this way in Los Angeles as much as she feels it here, as much as she feels it in hotel rooms when she’s touring a show, and as much she felt it in Paris. This aching, prolonged death by homesickness is not alleviated by home so much as it is exacerbated by her body being the one to return to it. 

Christen would like to be nothing but the cusp of seventeen in spirit, without the trouble or turmoil, and leave her body behind in the street. Start again, motionless. 

But nowadays, Christen very rarely gets what she wants, and so, instead, she shoves open the door to 890 Broadway. The big stone arches weep down at her beneath the years-old banner that had shot for grandiosity and missed by a mile. 

It's early enough that it's mostly empty save a few janitors and junior dancers who wave at her kindly and send her Bambi eyes, respectively, and so Christen tracks the hall to Studio 6B - Tobin’s choice, which figures, given the spiderwebs in the doorframe and the splintered glass in the viewing window. 

It’s locked, and Tobin is nowhere. They were meant to meet at exactly seven. Christen waits until a quarter past to get pissed off. She glances up and down the hallway fruitlessly, all she sees is floorboards and the cold fingers of bad installation. Awesome. Perfect. Brilliant. 

Honestly, if she was expected to get along with Tobin, she thinks Tobin could try a little harder to be likable. Of course there's the whole mutual-life-ruining-spit-on-grave vibe to it come manners or good weather, but Christen hardly thinks a little time-keeping could do any harm.

Two minutes is two minutes is two minutes, but Christen hates the cold, and she’s not fond of Tobin, and so she slumps against the wall and digs out her phone, in her opinion, suitably pissed off. 

She has ten unread text messages, a missed call from Tyler, and thirty-nine emails. At least half of the emails are bound to be spam or scheduling, and she suspects a few are thinly veiled threats. Christen isn’t being run out of town per se, but she is being strongly encouraged towards the exit. She can’t say she wouldn’t do the same.

The message that pins her in place, however, is the one from her dad’s number from the night before, his contact photo grinning hugely into the grimness of his message. Christen had promised to check in when she got settled in New York. She hadn’t. 

Dad: 

_ Checking in, Chrissie - are you ok?  _

9:05pm

Christen sighs, thumbing over the message gently. A question for the ages. A question he’d been asking with winced eyes for years. She checks the hall end to end once more, no Tobin in sight, the door still cold locked, and presses the call button. 

It rings three times, and for a moment, a split deluded second, she thinks he won’t pick up, that the years and the blood splatter are too much. That the second chances of New York are his second chance to give up and cut and run. 

He picks up as the fourth ring begins its wind up. 

“Chris?” His voice croaks. Christen bangs her head against the wall lightly when she remembers the time difference. She’s probably accidentally given him a heart attack. 

“Dad, hi,” she says, “I’m sorry, I forgot the time.” 

“It’s alright, it’s fine.” There's the crinkling of sheets and the sound of him settling the phone back against his cheek, “Everything okay, honey?” 

“Yeah, I just, um,” Christen sighs. His voice sounds like the hot leather seats of the back of the family car in the middle of summer, tight as the seatbelt that chafed at her shoulders. “Just checking in.” 

He hums down the line, “Is it nice to be back in New York? That cat of yours keeping you company?”

It's an awkward question, but, Christen supposes, a fair one. New York is certainly not anything that fits nice. New York is homesickness and drags like fingernails on her calves. New York is Tobin. 

“It's cold,” Christen says, simply, staring at the fading wallpaper across from her. "I think Nurse likes the bugs in my walls, though." 

Once upon a time, he might’ve made a joke in the space she leaves for him to colour with her number. He might’ve commented on the time he’d spent there or the California sunshine that ran through her blood. Maybe he’d just tease her for the same old comment still tracing her lips after all these years. 

Instead, he makes an affirmative noise. 

“It’ll be spring soon, though.” Christen offers. 

“That's the spirit,” her dad says, cheerful in its inflection though not its tone. And then, like a bullet she’d loaded for him, “And... you’re getting along okay with Tobin?”

Christen sighs, running her free hands across the bridge of her nose.

She wants to yell  _ no _ . No, and how could she ever? How could she look at her and see anything but what happened, what he’s holding against her now? How could she get along with Tobin when she’d hardly been able to manage to when all they were contending with was different backgrounds and separate opportunities?

Christen isn’t getting along with Tobin, because Tobin hasn’t been getting along. Christen isn’t getting along with Tobin, because the whole world still holds her to ransom. 

But it’s her dad, and it’s seven in the morning, and Tobin should have been unlocking the door and guiding her through cruel instructions almost half an hour ago. 

“I don’t know. It’s complicated.” She settles on a moment of blind, hopeful, honesty. “She’s different from how I remember her.”

“Anger changes us,” he pauses heavily. “Just like guilt.” 

“Dad-” Christen sighs.

“I know. I know.” Her dad says, but he sounds like he decidedly does not. He sounds like a man who mistrusts her as much as he loves her, who’ll go down with the ship of her guilt out of love for its navigator. Christen feels like the set painter, drawing each line of the waves as instructed by the directors of a story she’d rather not tell.

She’s so sick of this endless show. She’s so sick of the truth. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Christen stares at the crack in the ceiling that a fresh coat of paint might almost cover, “I worry about you. I worry about the two of you together, the hurt you’re going to inflict on yourself.” 

Christen doesn’t think there’s much damage left to do, but she’s sure they’ll try. 

Because, when final places are called, there is this; Tobin’s knee doesn’t hold itself together anymore, and Christen’s heart doesn’t fare much better. How much blood was left in either body part to spill down that same staircase or drip along with that same airport terminal? It doesn’t seem like much, not when it's beating. 

“You don’t have to worry. I’m a big girl now,” Christen says, trying for a joke. 

Her dad huffs an appeasing laugh. “And big girls don’t cry, huh?” 

“Thanks, Fergie,” she snorts. At the end of the hall, a door bangs, the outside air accommodating low muttering and shuffling, rubber squeaking steps. 

“Keep your chin up, Chrissy, I’m sure Tobin will come around if you give her time.” Christen doesn’t know how to explain that Tobin isn’t the only one needing to turn that corner, and so she just nods, 3,980 kilometers out of his sight. He wouldn’t believe her if she told him.

No one has ever believed her when it came to this. 

The telltale sound of unevenly weighted footsteps and hushed voices nears, and Christen doesn’t need to glance up to know that it’s Tobin, the smell of hospital soap and the burn behind her eyes would be enough, but Christen does it anyway. Kevin is next to her, coffee cup scrunched between his hands, looking harried and unrested.

“Talk later, Dad.” She sighs down the line, Kevin sending her a greeting smile. Her dad grumbles a stilted goodbye, and Christen presses the  _ end call _ button without dwelling on the lack of an “ _ I love you _ .” 

She’s a big girl and she can take care of herself. She’ll always be his daughter, even if she wears it like a threat some days. She brushes it aside like a bothersome fly and turns to face Kevin and Tobin, pushing her phone into the front pocket of her bag. 

“Morning,” Christen says, as politely as possible. It's an octave too high and pitch too close to customer services, but Tobin doesn’t even lookup.

Tobin grunts once in acknowledgment, her head tilting sideways in Christen’s direction as she tugs a key card out. There are dark circles under her eyes that look closer to bruises than shadows and her hair is unwashed. It lays in clumps, the marks from fingers dragging it back still evident from the grease. She looks like shit, frankly. Christen barely recognises her without the easy confidence and untouchable rightness she had when they were teenagers. 

Christen used to think that some people were born just right; fully formed and without need for introspection. Their shoes were always tied and their stomachs always ran smooth, while people like Christen scampered after them with the wrong hair and the wrong voice. Tobin had always seemed like the poster child of that God-given perfection. 

Right now, she looks like a good example of what to stay away from. As if she should be on a poster warning of the effects of depression. 

It's grim, and it makes Christen miss Tobin as if she has any right to as if Tobin isn’t the reason there was ever enough space to miss her in. 

“Sorry to keep Tobin from you, a chat was needed,” Kevin says, smiling with coffee-stained teeth. Christen smiles back with as much fondness as she can muster while standing on stiff legs in a drafty corridor. 

“You’re the boss. Keep her as long as you like.” She shrugs. 

Christen’s feet ache and her bones are cold, but she can’t exactly say  _ ‘no, screw you, Kevin, get the woman who hates me here sooner so that I can spend less of my time on the cliff's edge of this war of words.’  _ She supposes she could, actually, just not if she wants to keep her career in a profession so filled with the undercut. Tobin sends her a toxic look like she knows she’s thinking it, anyway.

Kevin just laughs. 

“Christen, mon cher, if you wouldn’t mind, could you come see me after your session today?” Kevin asks, almost cheery. He seems tired, beneath it, with greying temples and a big woolen coat. He smells like the same tobacco he always has. 

Next to him, Tobin folds her arms over her chest and tilts her chin up in something like defiance. Christen remembers that expression from her dancing. When she was under bright lights and dark attention, that trademark brooding smugness they all fawned over. Courage in performance. Performance of courage. It was hard to be sure of which. 

Christen doesn’t want to deal with either, and she glances at Kevin. When she looks back, Tobin rolls her eyes at her. 

“Of course,” Christen agrees, raising her eyebrows. She shifts her grip on her gym bag, lessening the weight of it on her shoulders. There's an irritated red mark from the strap digging in. “Is something wrong?” 

Kevin grimaces, shaking his head, “No, no, nothing bad. Just need to chat. It won’t take long. I don’t want to keep you from your lunch, Christen.” Kevin says, with a smile, stepping around her with a glance at his watch, leaving Christen almost shoulder to shoulder, but carefully untouching, to Tobin. He spins on his heel so he’s still looking back at them, taking a blind step backward. 

“Press doesn’t eat, Kev, she’s a prima ballerina,” Tobin says nastily, and Christen blinks at her. The  _ fucking  _ hypocrisy-

“Now, I’m sure that isn’t true. Our dancers are well trained in nutrition, as you well know, my dear.” Kevin says quickly with a tilted smile. Christen narrows her eyes at Tobin. Tobin smiles right back. 

“I’m dedicated to my craft. I know how to look after myself,” Christen says, cold as nails. Tobin’s smile sours and Christen tries not to like the flare of pride it brings up in her chest. It's hard not to find any satisfaction in it. 

“Of course,” Kevin says, tired. “Christen, you know where to find me when you’re done, yes?” 

“Pretty sure she’s familiar with your office, Kev,” Tobin mutters, sliding her keycard over the lock, doubling the space between them. Kevin gives her a pointed look. Tobin ignores it in favour of yawning into the doorframe. 

“I’ll be there,” Christen assures him. Kevin gives her a tight smile. 

“Play nice, dance well,” he says, spinning back around and heading the rest of the way down the hall with a backward wave. 

Tobin snorts and waves the arm that isn’t busy propping her up in the doorway around, gesturing Christen inside. A small and petty part of Christen wants to dig her heels in and wait for Tobin to cross the threshold first. She moves through the door and doesn’t look at Tobin’s set expression.

“You were late,” Christen says, working her jaw as she places her bag carefully by the mirror of the studio walls, shedding her camisole and tugging her pointe shoes out of her bag. Tobin barely glances at her, tossing her own bag into the corner of the room and wandering over to fiddle with the dials of the stereo. 

Tobin walks haltingly as if her balance could be thrown off at any second. She still holds that same saunter, though; the kind of movement Christen had envied her when they were kids. The movement of kings who’d never questioned the dynasty bestowed them - even if they lost a leg along the way.

“Morning to you too, Press,” she says. Her sneer is only an undertone. Nothing close to her usual efforts. Almost pathetic, really. 

Christen huffs and begins wrapping the ribbon of her pointe shoes up her ankles in careful, clean notes, bright against her skin but not so tight the circulation changes. Tobin keeps fiddling with the stereo, her phone in one hand. 

“You left me in the corridor for forty-five minutes. The least you can do is say sorry,” Christen mutters to the floor. 

“You left me at the bottom of a staircase for nine years and I’m still waiting on the bouquet, Christen, so forgive my manners, yeah?” Tobin says it like cool glass, not a hint of anger. She is a monotone bullet singing through Christen’s chest. Christen pulls in a long breath through her nose. Inhales, exhales, inhales. 

“Are we talking about that now?” she asks. She tries to find Tobin’s eye, but Tobin is staring in the mirror at the back of the room. “Is that something we do? Acknowledge it?”

Tobin’s jaw clenches. “I don’t, like,  _ want _ to, if you’re feeling generous.” 

“Then don’t bring it up,” Christen says. “Because there  _ was _ a bouquet.I didn’t  _ leave _ you anywhere. And it isn’t my fault that you don’t seem to know that.” 

Tobin says nothing. 

“Can we at least try and get along?” Christen implores of her. It would all be so much easier if Tobin was anybody else. If Tobin wasn’t— 

Well, if she wasn’t someone Christen hasn’t let herself think about since she was twenty-one. 

“I’m not the one with the problem here,” Tobin snaps. Christen looks at her, doubt written plain on her face. “Okay, fine, but it's at  _ least _ mutual.” 

“It is,” Christen says, “But we still have to work together. Nothing else counts. And for the record, however much you hate me for…  _ that _ night, I still have a monopoly on the feeling.” 

Tobin stares at her, with all the weight of nine years and a spindle of blood down those fated stairs. Tobin looks at her, and Christen remembers Chicago, a week into the summer tour when they were only kids in the corps trying to prove who could holdest still the longest while the principals had their go at the solos of Swan Lake. Remembers Tobin laughing into the evening and Christen wanting so badly to be like her. Remembers how that was the last time they really spoke.

She remembers the beads on the snowflake headpieces, months and months— maybe years, Christen doesn’t know, it's been so long— later and, how Tobin had said they looked like crystal balls. 

She remembers thinking that was funny, later, when she was in a cab and everybody was going to hate her forever. 

Everybody is not all that many people when you’re young. Everybody can still be the whole wide world of hurt. 

Tobin stares at her, and Christen stares right back.

“It's been a long morning,” Tobin says, finally. It's not really an apology, but it surpasses anything Christen expected. After a moment she adds, “Do you know  _ Giselle _ ?” 

They really aren’t going to talk about it, then. Christen doesn’t know whether to be angry or relieved. 

“Obviously,” Christen says, tugging the last string through her ribbon and tying it off with nimble fingers. When she looks up, Tobin is watching her hands. 

* * *

_ Giselle _ was the story of the weak-hearted dancer and a foolish penchant for loving.  _ Giselle _ was the story of a lover who fell for a man who pretended to be someone else to love her.  _ Giselle _ was the story of Giselle: who died and then haunted every single man that had screwed her over, the ghost of betrayed women. 

The first time Christen danced in  _ Giselle _ she was still holding baby fat and bitter disappointment as she flitted through the background of the backbreaking work that was dancing on the stage of the Paris Opera Ballet. Everyone else she knew had been tunneled into the studio since, seemingly, birth, and she was the American in the wake of banishment. 

The first time Christen danced  _ Giselle _ , she understood perfectly where Giselle was coming from when she went mad at a revelation and an accusation and agreed completely when she let the man who had betrayed her dance himself into his own grave and only protested when the one who loved her was allowed to slink back home.

Christen had reached skyward as the curtain fell on that first performance, and felt the cleanness of a classic, the rebirth of a final end. 

She’d received a page full of Google-translated feedback and areas to improve upon if she wanted a future at the company. Christen, like Giselle, didn’t think she’d ever love to dance again. 

Christen just wishes there was a grave to crawl back to, that her cavalier could find a hometown rather than the two of them lingering around this city like the theatre-bound ghosts they were always doomed to be.

* * *

The shuttering sounds of  _ No.7. A Variation de Giselle  _ is all that Christen lets collect under the height of her pointe shoes, pink silk stark against the curve of her ankle. They’d need to be dyed to match her skin before a performance, but it doesn’t matter under studio lighting. It doesn’t matter when there’s a company costumer stitching fabric against moldable frames in the basement to do it for her, instead of leaving her colouring the edges with a sharpie the way she had to when she was sixteen. It doesn’t matter, except for all the ways that it does. 

Tobin had never changed her shoes, not even a stitch, to match the cut of her legs. Christen used to hold it against her, but there are larger things to pin into the stretch of her leotard now. 

Christen holds a pose, the strain of her calf bulging on one last stretch before she clatters back to the ground, quick steps from point A to point B. 

She can feel the rigidity in herself, and she can feel all the spots where it aches more than anything has because all Christen can think is  _ move _ , and  _ jump _ , and  _ relevé.  _

She’s danced her way through two variations and listened to Tobin point out every flaw in her second position - Christen isn’t a violent person, contrary to popular belief, but  _ by God _ could she make good on the strikes against her name and  _ throttle _ Tobin for that - she isn’t in the mood to hear Tobin’s half-hearted assessments of her problems. 

It feels like a thousand years since she last held back her smile through a variation when the character demanded severity but her joy demanded expression. It's been a lifetime and news of Tobin’s career titillating off the edge three times over since she danced Giselle through the air and knew what it was to  _ love _ in such an unadulterated way. 

It is hard, though. It’s hard and it hurts the soles of her feet and when she ices them tonight they’ll look vaguely blue. Christen had let herself forget the hurt in the midst of love. And what did Tobin know about that? 

Tobin was good. You could argue she was another G-word. Christen liked tradition, though. She liked the antiquated choreography and the traditional music, the swells and flows and tight rapture of a beat. 32 pirouettes and a girl named Clara; that was her ballet. 

Tobin’s ballet had been whatever she felt like on the day, always charming ballet masters into letting her besmirch the classics with a big grin and easy  _ ‘come on, dude.’  _

Christen liked tradition. Tobin liked doing whatever she wanted. They were never going to get along all that well. 

The truckload of salt dumped in the wound of it all was that everyone  _ liked _ Tobin. Liked the way she didn’t follow the well-hammered rules of the dance. Liked that she didn’t seem to care one way or another. Liked her well enough to cast her as the lead time and time again. 

It had driven her to a point of insanity, this admiration they all had for Tobin’s disregard. 

That was years past. Now Christen has her job, and Tobin has a right knee held together by a thread. 

She’s so tired. She’s never going to sleep again.

Her ankles roll and her muscles ache. She feels each movement like a knife wedged between her ribs, pressed right up against her lungs. This is what ballet has become, a painful, dragged-out violent death. 

If Giselle died for her foolish trust in someone who promised her love, then Christen has lived for persisting mistrust and acceptance of the ‘mad scenes’ of her life. 

When Tobin finally lets her leave, her ankles are sore and the front of her leotard is slick with sweat, the sun outside the windows drooping through the sky. Tobin is still wrapped in her coat, fiddling with her phone. They don’t acknowledge each other when Christen steps out of the room, Christen thinks it might be the closest to getting along that they have in them, and for that, Christen wishes the stage would open up beneath her. 

If you were to ask, Christen would tell you this: she didn’t do it on purpose. 

She broke the headpiece because she was angry - the _ at Tobin _ of the equation isn’t relevant - and it felt right. She dropped the bead because she was careless. She ruined Tobin’s life, and it had nothing to do with Tobin and -

And Tobin meant it. Tobin meant it when she did the same to Christen. 

That's why the anger makes her so damn tired every single time. 

It's why some things are best left unsaid, because if you were to ask, then Christen could tell you that she never decided who she hated more, and so she’ll punish them both. 

Kevin’s office is, of course, exactly as she remembers it, and she hates that Tobin’s assessment was so true. Its shiny, polaroid quality hasn’t worn away within a few weeks, just as it didn’t in nine years, or all those years plus two months. There’s still a seepy quality to the rafters of the ceiling, and Christen still feels disjointed and wary propped in the chair across from him. 

Something about Kevin is disjointed for the space. He seems the kind of man who should sit above opals and make easy decisions with a difficult smile, pointing to a backdrop and creating a universe. With all the power of the brush of his pen, he should be something grander than she is.

Christen remembers what he looked like when he himself still danced, all dark hair gelled smoothly into a shiny helmet across his head and navy tights against thick slabs of muscle only held together by light skin. Christen has watched bodies move through the impossible for so long there hardly seems to be humanity in flesh anymore, only makeup and muscle and the made-up. 

He had been brilliant, consuming, extravagant as he held prima ballerinas above his head, dipped his knees in a perfect Romeo, seared across a stage as the Mouse King. He’d been experimental and traditional and Christen had wanted to be just like him, right up until she’d been pointed in the direction of the tutus and told to want for men and as women. 

She hadn’t lived up to all those expectations, and Kevin doesn’t live up to his presence now either. 

He used to be the best, and now his shirt is unbuttoned to his navel, the hair on his chest curling out over the buttonholes, his breath smelling of cigarettes. Christen wonders how many years she has left, wonders how long until all the fools gold that floats through the air around her becomes little more than dust particles the next in line will bat their hands at. 

Not long enough and too long all at once. 

Kevin coughs into the crease of his elbow. His deservedness is just her memory playing tricks on her. 

“I know you said it wasn’t anything serious-” Christen starts gingerly, watching Kevin warily as he closes the door to his office behind him with a click, the edge of his shirt cuff brushing away any spittle from his mouth. Christen keeps her back ramrod straight in her chair.

Kevin bumps his thigh on the edge of the desk as he whisks around to take his place behind the desk. There's a stone-cold cup of half-drunk tea resting atop of a stack of papers. 

“I said it wasn’t anything  _ bad _ ,” Kevin says, dropping heavily into the spin of his chair. It's high-backed and leather, wearing down to reveal the cushioning on the arms. “But you’re still wondering if I’m a liar.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that.” Christen objects. 

“How’ve you been, Christen?” Kevin asks, redirecting her attention with a concerned raise of his eyebrows. 

Christen thinks about Nurse mewling at her chin, digging his claws into her thigh. Thinks of the way her knees groan around the belt of her bone and the ice that is always filling her bathtub. Thinks of her Dad. Alex. Tobin. 

“I’m good.” She shrugs. She’s not a liar. She’s an artist. 

Kevin hums with a brush through the folders on his desk. “You and Tobin are working well together?” 

Christen can’t stop the short laugh that crawls out of her throat and draws Kevin’s eyebrows low over his eyes in concern. “People keep asking me that.” 

“It’s not a completely unwarranted question, sweetheart,” Kevin says, careful consideration as he plucks the words from his tonsils and arranges each vowel between them. 

“Do you hate me too?” Christen just wants to know. She needs to gauge. 

Kevin sighs a long, harsh breath through his nose, rubbing at the space between his eyebrows. There’s a deep furrow there that she doubts he can smooth out with a simple touch. “I think you hate yourself more than anyone could have reason to hate you.”

“Except Tobin,” Christen says, because it’s true, even in the places where  _ it _ isn’t. 

“Except maybe Tobin.” Kevin concedes. It  _ shouldn’t _ hurt more from his mouth than hers. But  _ shouldn’t _ has never stopped her heart before. “But, hatred, I think, is very different from anger.” Kevin stops before he adds, “Which begs the question of which side of the line you’re on.” 

Christen snorts. “Does it really matter?” 

“Are you here for confession, Christen? Because it might be best left unsaid after all this time.” Kevin says it like he’s really asking. Like he might truly want the answer to this and to this alone. Christen’s soul has been the site of an archeological dig for so long it feels foreign, to be asked rather than have the clay that lines her stomach turned up and over and weighed for how heavily it holds her guilt in place. 

“I don’t have anything to confess to.” 

Kevin sighs heavily. Whatever spell of safety he had cast breaks. 

Christen scoffs, “No one believes me.  _ Still _ _.”_

“It wouldn’t be unheard of for jealousy-”

“No, it wouldn’t. But I didn’t. It was an accident, and she’s  _ fine _ now-”

“Is she? Is that what you’d call it?” Kevin asks, low but not harsh. 

Christen isn’t sure that Tobin is. Her knee certainly isn’t. She knows the rumours hold more weight than they’ve been credited for, and they’ve been given plenty. Tobin’s knee never really recovered, but she knows this time it's out for the count, just as surely as she knows that Kevin isn’t asking about her knee.

Without hesitation or variance, she knows that he’s asking about the burning in Tobin’s eyes and the nausea in her voice at  _ ‘staircase.’  _

“I thought it’d be different this time. I thought everyone would have moved on or forgotten, or, I don’t know, realised. But they haven’t. And they’re not going to.” Christen says, shaking her head. There’s a photo frame on Kevin’s desk, and she stares right through the back of it, where there’s only black felt that dust clings to, without a picture in sight. 

“Christen-”

“My dad thinks I did it.” Christen says, “He’s barely looked at me since.” 

“I’m sorry to hear that.” 

“No one else is, they think that it's what I deserve. If Tobin doesn’t get her knee then I don’t get my dad, right?” Christen has seen Alex’s face in tandem. The baby in the stroller blinking up at her with innocence. It stings to know that she too will one day hold that same generational anger that the cobblestones outside do. 

This is penance, and she hates it more than she’s healed by it.

It seems to fight with tooth and nail towards retribution because Christen has watched the world burn a thousand times through a day and every night in her dreams, but it never seems to change. 

“I don’t hate you, Christen,” Kevin says, eventually. “Unfortunately, though, it didn’t matter what I believed. It still doesn’t. It matters what perception of the truth my dancers are impacted by.” 

Christen goes cold all over and sharp as ice. 

She clears her throat and fixes as much of a smile as is appropriate onto her face. “I understand perfectly. I don’t blame you. What was it you wanted to talk about today?”

Kevin blinks at her, surprise crossing his face before he collects himself, flicking open one of the folders on his desk with a grimace. “Yes. Right.” 

He tugs out what looks to be the thousandth photocopied version of ABT’s spring calendar, lists of names of the seasons signed dancers lining the bottom, the soloists bolded while the principals get their own block. A few of the names have been struck out, several added on beneath the mass of them in pen.

It would’ve bothered her once, the incremental threat looming. This time around, Christen doesn’t bother with the worry. It is a hard-won lesson to know that it doesn’t matter how good you are, how much effort you pour into something, if you’re hated or loved by the wrong people you can still lose everything.

The best Christen has is neutrality. 

“We’re doing Romeo and Juliet as the finale of the spring season. I plan to have you cast as our primary Juliet.” Kevin says in as businesslike a tone as she’s ever heard him use. 

Christen should be excited over that. Should is feeling harder and harder, further and further away. 

She clears her throat, “Thank you for the opportunity.” 

“I know it hasn’t been an easy start, but you are a skilled performer, Christen. We have faith in you.” Kevin says, almost gravely. Christen doesn’t know how much of that faith has been earnt, or how much is real. All she knows is that she can’t imagine a world where she can’t at least have this. 

The rise, the rise, the rise. 

Be damned for the fall, the fall, the fall. 

“I’m sure you’ll be involved in other shows during the season in some capacity, but Romeo and Juliet is, we hope, something of a return to those rafters we discussed,” Kevin says with a small smile, harried and tired. Christen returns it as much as she can. 

Her dad would tell her this was a good thing, she thinks. Amandine, flitting across the stage in France and scoffing down the phone line when Christen calls her, would probably judge it to be “appropriate.” Nurse would snuff at her until he got his dinner. 

Crystal, at least, would be excited for her, she hopes.

That’s it, though. That's all the community she has in the world to care. Christen isn’t even sure she counts as a voice of it. 

Kevin hands her a paper copy of the show's calendar, the preliminary rehearsal dates highlighted in an orange pen that seems to have run out with each stroke. Christen takes it between her thumb and forefinger with a rough smile, and thanks him as she stands. 

She pauses, gripping around the harsh edges of the door of Kevin’s office. She’d read once that humans had the strength in their jaws to bite off their own fingers, and in their hands to rip another human's hands apart, if they needed. The only thing that held back that viciousness were their own minds. Silent stop signs that appeared right before the strike.

Christen flexes her fingers. “I don’t think that Tobin should be allowed to teach. Regardless of our personal history, she doesn’t do an effective job, and I think she’s too focused on her own injuries to assist anyone else's performance. I can’t perform in this sort of environment.”

_ Get rid of Tobin, or you’re losing me.  _ Christen understands, for the first time, how Tobin must have felt when she did the same to her, all those years ago. When she’d clawed her way out of a hospital bed to direct her own brand of justice at whichever point it landed. It’s good and bad and better than she’s been in years. 

Kevin swallows. “Thank you for your honesty.” 

Christen nods and shuts the door of Kevin’s office behind her solidly. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can find me [ here](https://softnoirr.tumblr.com/)  
> comments are most beloved and appreciated xx


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